my body is a cage
by aFigureOfSpeech
Summary: For once, Rebekah comes first. [Rebekah&Elijah, family above all]


**Title: **love me dead  
**Word Count: **~600  
**Fandom/Characters:** The Vampire Diaries; Rebekah, Elijah  
**Rating:** T (for references to blood, violence, and torture)  
**Disclaimer:** TVD does not belong to me, I just need these siblings to interact more.  
**Summary: **_For once, Rebekah comes first. _[Rebekah&Elijah, family above all]

**Note:** I am over 9000% done with all the shit that happens to Rebekah. I desperately want her to go bond with her other brothers-so I guess that makes this fix-it fic? Eh. Directly inspire by a fandom confession, and dedicated to both loup and Charlotte (for reasons they are likely already aware of). There's also a good chance that this fic runs rampant with inaccuracies; I just...don't really care at this point.

* * *

"Rebekah." She thinks she must be hallucinating; Elijah stands outside her disgrace of a cell, his hair uncharacteristically disheveled and an unfamiliar wildness haunting the corners of his eyes. Most hallucinations cannot snap metal bars, however, so she can only conclude that he must be quite real.

Quicker than her drugged eyes can follow, he is at her side, hands inspecting her wounds with gentle urgency. They are stained up to the wrists with still-fresh blood, another oddity on her usually fastidious brother, but that does not concern her much now.

"Can you walk?" he asks, his voice carefully controlled. (He has always excelled at making control look so effortless, and there have been times when she's hated him for it. Then again, it is when the cracks start to show that she knows she truly must worry.) She tries to stand for him, but finds her body as infuriatingly lethargic and unresponsive as it has been during this entire nightmarish ordeal. They cannot kill her, but they can reduce her to this.

She refuses to cry for them.

"Peace, sister. I will carry you." He pushes her hair back from her eyes, tracing her temple with his fingers, then lifts her into his arms with care. (It reminds of when she was small, and he would carry her thus any time she asked. How safe and precious she had felt—would that they could be again as they were then.) She wraps her arms around his neck and buries her face in his chest, strong with the scent of him and dizzyingly refreshing after so much poisoned air.

He hesitates as they leave, and Rebekah knows without looking that he has stopped at the doppleganger's cell. A shudder runs through her whole body, leaving her more drained than even before, more drained than she would have thought possible—in the end, she is never enough for them, is she?

Again, metal bars screech in protest, and voices converse that she does not care to attend to, but in the next moment she feels sunshine caress her skin. Elijah moves steadily away.

Bodies strewn the grass, and few are fully intact. Blood is _everywhere_, and the smell alone helps to revitalize her; there is blood on Elijah's shirt too she realizes, though not hers, and oh, he was so fond of that shirt.

"What a mess you have made, brother," she murmurs, giggling on jagged edge, more and more until her lungs ache with it, until tears finally strangle her laughter and she doesn't try to stop them, until she finally allows herself to cry: for the pain, for the relief, for every rage and injustice she has ever suffered (and survived, eternally survived) at the hands of strangers—and worse, those she loves dearest.

"Always and forever, little sister," he replies, pressing a tender kiss to her brow. His eyes are as deep and ageless as she remembers them, and now they simmer with a wrath that promises to match hers, that promises a long and delightfully bloody retribution upon those who had made the mistake of crossing their family. They will, as ever, pay dearly for it.

("Here's your family," she seethes with righteous, agonizing fury, and never has spilt blood brought her such sweet satisfaction—he can snap her neck a thousand times, but he can never, ever make her regret it. She is not the one forsworn.)


End file.
